


invisible and weightless

by damerons (noblydonedonnanoble)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Gen, References to suicidal ideation, also I def intend for there to be background Din/Cobb, but it's SO in the background that I didn't wanna tag, currently canon compliant but since The Mandalorian is still going, this might become non compliant at some point idk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 08:53:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28348707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noblydonedonnanoble/pseuds/damerons
Summary: Poe Dameron was seconds from getting his nose broken in a run-down bar in a nowhere town on Tatooine. And while he couldn’t remember for sure, he knew that he probably deserved it.[takes place in 19 ABY]
Relationships: Poe Dameron & Din Djarin
Comments: 2
Kudos: 43





	invisible and weightless

Poe Dameron was seconds from getting his nose broken in a run-down bar in a nowhere town on Tatooine. And while he couldn’t remember for sure, he knew that he probably deserved it.

He was so drunk that he could barely make out the Togruta that was winding back to take the punch. There was just a blur of a face and big menacing shoulders and a fist. That fist was engulfing what was left of Poe’s consciousness.

“Leave the kid be, Havraa.”

The fist froze, and the Togruta along with it.

“You can’t be serious.” The Togruta – Poe realized belatedly – had turned toward the voice, and Poe looked over as well.

Zorii had warned him that Mos Pelgo was under the protection of a Mandalorian. Frankly, she came within an inch of admitting that it was the main reason that no one else on the crew wanted to go; the main reason that they shunted the job down the food chain until it got to Poe. But when she’d given Poe the info on the job, and on their contact, she’d reassured him that the Mandalorian was around only sporadically. _The contact guarantees that the Mando will be gone when the deal goes down_ , she’d said.

Sure. That wasn’t enough to comfort anyone else on the crew, so it certainly didn’t comfort Poe.

But _kriffing hell_. As if his luck wasn’t bad enough, now he was probably going to be killed by a Mandalorian just for running a little bit of spice.

The Mandalorian said nothing, but the Togruta argued back anyway. “I caught him and that low-life Ugnaught trying to make a trade. I told ‘em Cobb doesn’t want that bahko around here, and this little punk had the nerve to start arguing with me. He threw the first punch, I swear.”

Damn, Poe threw the first punch?

Eh. Probably true. Zorii always said that he was probably too impulsive to last long in this business. That _might_ have been part of why she told him he needed to stop drinking when a job was still unfinished. But hey, the contact had been late. Was Poe supposed to just sit and wait?

The Mandalorian hummed, barely audible through his modulator. He looked between Poe and the Togruta. At least, Poe was pretty sure that he looked between them—his helmet certainly seemed to adjust the requisite amount to take them both in. “I’ll deal with him.”

It was a strange moment. Was Poe supposed to be relieved that his nose remained unbroken – that he wouldn’t have to waste his precious bacta spray on a barfight – when he was being handed over to a Mandalorian? The Togruta didn’t seem thrilled about it either, which was… something, maybe, but he also probably just wanted to do the damage himself.

Poe felt the grip on his shirt loosen, and suddenly he was no longer being pressed against the wall. He sniffed and made a show of straightening himself up, as though he _could_ look straightened up. As if his bloodied face, messy hair, and torn shirt would have looked any tidier if he hadn’t been in this particular bar at this particular moment.

He wasn’t free for long. No sooner had the Torguta cleared out than the Mandalorian had his hand on Poe’s arm, and Poe was too drunk to imagine resisting.

(So there, Zorii. Sometimes he knew when not to pick a fight.)

“C’mon, kid.”

The Mandalorian pulled Poe across the room with ease, leaning him against the bar. “Can I get some Morning Poison?”

Poe snorted. “Little morbid to bring me with you to order the poison that’s gonna kill me, Mando.”

“If I wanted to kill you, I wouldn’t do it like that, mir’sheb.” The Mandalorian sounded affronted by the suggestion. He shoved a glass of what looked like tar into Poe’s hand. “House special. Drink it in one gulp if you can.”

Maybe Poe was a moron for not bothering with any questions, but he suspected that that drink was going to end up in his stomach whether he wanted it or not. So he was probably a moron either way.

(Yeah, that felt a little too real.)

It was the most rancid thing Poe had ever consumed, and since joining up with the Spice Runners, he’d consumed his fair share of absolute garbage. His eyes were watering when he was done, but as instructed, he finished it all off in one go.

“Not bad,” the Mandalorian said. There was a laugh in his voice.

“What the hell was that druk?” Poe wiped at his mouth with his sleeve as he spoke.

“Best hangover cure in the galaxy. I’m not interested in waiting for you to become lucid.”

As soon as he said it, Poe could feel that it was working. His world seemed just a little less shaky, his limbs a little more connected to his body. 

He was being dragged back to his table in the corner now. The Mandalorian dropped him unceremoniously into the seat, then settled in across from him.

“Lucid for what?” Poe asked. His voice sounded a little vacant to his own ears, and he cleared his throat. “You’re not going to talk me to death, are you? I’ve never heard of a chatty Mandalorian before.”

The Mandalorian exhaled and muttered, “Copaani mirshmure’cye?” Poe cleared his throat again, nervously thinking of the last time he heard a Mandalorian grousing in Mando’a. Let’s just say that it didn’t work out too well for the guy who made the mistake of pissing him off. But then the Mandalorian raised his voice. “Maybe that’s because we don’t like answering stupid questions.”

Poe felt his face heat up, although the bar was dark enough that he doubted anyone else would be able to see his blush.

He didn’t apologize outright, but he stopped talking. He could read between the lines enough to pick up on that instruction.

The two men sat in silence for some time. Poe’s head continued to clear. The Mandalorian stared him down. (Maybe? Or maybe he was just taking a nap under that helmet, wasting Poe’s time when he should have been on his way home hours ago.)

“How old are you, kid?”

Well, that wasn’t quite what he was expecting. “Twenty.”

Silence from Mando. Poe blinked at him, trying to keep his expression neutral. Confident. Yes, Poe was absolutely twenty years old.

Long silence. So much fragging silence.

Poe groaned and rolled his eyes. “Seventeen.”

After another pause, this answer was apparently deemed acceptable, because the Mandalorian nodded slightly. “Do you want to tell me how you ended up running spice on a garbage heap like Tatooine?”

“Don’t you kind of live here?” Poe asked. Out of genuine surprise and curiosity, although he realized almost at once that he had made a mistake.

“What was that I said about stupid questions?” The Mandalorian’s helmet tilted to the side. “Seventeen-year-old spice runner. Why?”

And okay, here’s the thing.

Poe wasn’t sure whether he had an answer. Not one that made sense. It had all just sort of… happened, as much as that didn’t feel like what the Mando wanted to hear. Somehow Poe had gone from… clashing with his dad, to running away from Yavin, to stumbling into Zorii in a very iffy back alley on Kijimi. He was hungry, he was running short on credits, and he hadn’t been able to find any leads on a job. Zorii offered him one, an offer that came with promises of travel and adventure and danger.

How could Poe say no?

Why did this Mandalorian _care_?

“It was an accident,” he said at last.

This, too, evidently rang true, at least in a way. The Mandalorian exhaled loudly. “I believe that you believe that, kid. But that’s not what I see.”

“Hang on, you don’t _know_ me,” Poe rushed to point out, sitting a little taller in his seat as his expression grew harsh. “You come over and rescue me from a fight that I don’t need to be rescued from, and now you sit me down and try to tell _me_ why I became a spice runner? Who the hell do you think you are?”

Only after he finished talking did he realize that his outburst had garnered them something of an audience—the few other patrons in the bar had turned to look, staring between Poe and the Mandalorian as though they expected Poe to be thrown into a wall.

But the Mando crossed his arms and settled back in his seat. They lost everyone’s attention immediately.

“I was you, kid. Maybe not exactly, but close enough. Close enough to know a self-destructive death wish when I see one.” Poe’s expression went blank, and he wasn’t sure whether he could have opened his mouth to speak, but he didn’t need to, because the Mandalorian was still going. “Picking a fight with Havraa? You must have gotten in one punch, _maybe_ two, before he started to knock you senseless. There’s not enough of a demand for spice around here to justify that. If you had any sense, you would have cleared out.”

“Which is it?” Poe managed to ask. “I have a death wish or I don’t have any sense?”

A pause while the Mandalorian – seemingly sincerely – digested the question. “Probably both.”

Yeah, Poe should have seen that coming.

His dad had said that about him too, once. Only two nights before Poe took his mother’s A-wing and left Yavin forever, he’d listened to Kes Dameron scold him for the latest in his long line of stupid decisions. His father had suggested that Poe didn’t have any sense. That he had a death wish.

Poe didn’t like thinking about it, so obviously he remembered the moment quite frequently. He remembered the anger on Kes’s face, and he ached over it.

“Hard to believe a Mandalorian had a death wish,” Poe said. The closest he could muster to a response. “Aren’t you guys all about _honorable_ deaths?”

“I can’t say that I was expecting you to know the Code of Honor.”

“Oh yeah. I’m full of surprises.”

The Mandalorian laughed softly. Poe wasn’t sure what to make of it. “Yes, my Code demands that I experience an honorable death. In my youth, I wanted that moment to arrive as quickly as possible. At the time, I believed that it was because my success in life could not possibly rival the honor of a good death.”

Poe leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest like the Mandalorian. It immediately struck him that he looked like a young child trying to appear strong in the face of one of the galaxy’s mightiest warriors, and he balked at once, shifting forward in his seat again. “And now?”

“Now I understand that I was hoping my death would be enough to heal something deep within me. Something I don’t think I could have even named.”

Well. The Mandalorian sure as hell liked sitting in silence. Poe endured it, not wanting to agree. Knowing that there was no point in arguing.

And he was still sobering up, so he still didn’t truly have the energy to argue.

“It wouldn’t have worked,” the Mandalorian offered at last.

“Does it matter?” Poe asked softly. “Whether it would have worked.”

He was surprised by the softness in Mando’s voice as he said, “Do you think I would have pulled you out of that sorry excuse for a fight if I thought it didn’t matter?”

Despite the fact that the Mandalorian’s mask prevented Poe from having to meet his eye, Poe still couldn’t bring himself to look at the man across from him. He felt certain that it would be too much. That somehow it would ache in the same way that his memory of his father ached.

“I’ve burned all my bridges,” Poe confessed. “There’s nothing else for me but this. And it doesn’t exactly sound like you think I should be doing this, either.”

The Mandalorian hummed. “The way I see it, you got two choices. One, you find something else. A kid like you shouldn’t have to live this life.” He paused and appeared to consider Poe for a few long moments. “Otherwise…”

“Otherwise?”

With a shrug, Mando told him, “I became the best bounty hunter in the galaxy, so you could always do that. Or, you know. The spice runner equivalent.”

Kriff, this Mandalorian was “the best bounty hunter in the galaxy”? No, that was… no.

Could he be the same bounty hunter that almost all of the Spice Runners’ contacts were terrified of? Poe had lost track of the number of stories he’d heard about a Mandalorian bounty hunter whose reputation grew so large that some bounties turned themselves in almost the moment they learned he was searching for them. The story went that, almost a decade earlier, he began to take fewer and fewer jobs, until eventually there was no trace of him.

But no one believed that he had died. Everyone was certain that he would return to chase down criminals again someday.

“How did the best bounty hunter in the galaxy end up playing sheriff for some tiny town on Tatooine?” Again, the question came from a place of true curiosity, but again, Poe knew at once that he should not have asked.

Not that the Mandalorian said so. He did not need to say so.

All he needed to do was sit. Say nothing.

“I don’t want to see you back here, kid,” he said at last. “Not ever. I think you’ll believe me when I say that I’m not usually this hospitable to spice runners who show up in Cobb’s town knowing full well that he likes to keep it clean. I’d hate for you to have to see me that way, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” Poe agreed. He could barely choke the word out.

The Mandalorian nodded curtly. Poe was dismissed.

Poe stood up on shaky legs. He was just a few steps from the table when Mando added, “Get some water from the bar before you leave. That Morning Poison won’t really settle until you’ve hydrated.”

It didn’t settle anyway. Poe’s ship was located a short distance from town, but he barely made it out into the desert before he doubled over and vomited. He knew it was not the Morning Poison that had made him sick.


End file.
